Tag: Bots and Automated Attacks
Bots are not new. Attackers have used bots to achieve scalability in a variety of attack techniques for decades, and defenders have been fighting bots, to varying degrees of success, for just as long. However, two events in 2022—the prolonged acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk, with its attendant discussion about exactly how much of…
Read MoreFrom January to April 2023, Healthcare had the highest levels of unwanted Web automation. However, this automation saw a significant decrease in May 2023 before rebounding in June. The Hospitality industry has seen a steady increase in automation starting off as the eighth most targeted industry in January 2023 with 11.7% automation. This peaked in…
Read MoreIn contrast, identity providers in media, retail, and travel tended to see higher overlap, particularly among bot traffic in the travel industry. (High overlaps for aggregators in media and retail are skewed by a comparatively miniscule number of accounts submitted.) The technology industry showed narrow distributions for all three categories, which partly reflects the fact…
Read MoreIntroduction Much of the activity on the internet is automated, and quite a lot of it is specifically due to bots. Bots can be used for many purposes, but in this series of articles we’ll be looking at bots that create and use fake accounts. This first article looks at the motivations behind fake account…
Read MoreWelcome to the dedicated Executive Summary for our 2023 Identity Threat Report. Here we’ve brought together the bullet-list style summary that opens the full report, as well as a few curated selections and charts to get immediately to the “what do I need to know” of it all. And of course, if you want to…
Read MoreNeutral/Mixed Intentions Many of the actors in this system are neither completely benign nor completely malicious. Some of these practices are bifurcated into legal and illegal practices, such as the rather obvious distinction between criminal and benign payment facilitators. Some of these provide services that can genuinely be used either way, such as reshipping services…
Read MoreIn part two of this multi-part series on fake account creation bots, we look at why automation is used to create fake accounts and how they impact businesses. What is a Fake Account Creation Bot? A fake account creation bot is an automated computer program designed to create large numbers of fake accounts inside online…
Read MoreIn Part One of this series, we introduced fake account creation bots and why people create fake accounts, and in Part Two we covered why automation is used to create fake accounts and how fake accounts negatively impact businesses. In this article, we are going to focus on how to identify fake bot accounts. We…
Read MoreIntroduction Black Friday is a popular shopping event throughout the United States of America and around the world. During Thanksgiving weekend and Cyber Monday (the Monday after Thanksgiving), thousands of companies offer steep product discounts that are not available at any other time, and consumers rush to buy these items while they are available. This…
Read MoreDuring the reconnaissance period there were low levels of automated activity associated with resellers testing and configuring their bots in preparation for the January 11th sale (see Figure 1). Once the sale starts, the sale event period is categorized by a drastic spike in automation against the “add to cart” flow within the first few…
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